“The Wolf of Wall Street” — the Book
Source: theoccidentalobserver.net
How many times have you heard about financial crimes and frauds perpetrated by people who happen to be Jewish? How many times have you heard about the association of Jews and Wall Street? For most TOO readers, these themes should be amply familiar.Now let’s consider yet another instance of the above. Just before the economic meltdown of 2008, an important book about Wall Street appeared and became a bestseller. It was stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s first book about his crimes called The Wolf of Wall Street and was published in 2007 by major publisher Bantam Dell, a division of Random House.
Let’s allow an official overview to set up the tale:
By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170 foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called … “Wolf of Wall Street.” In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent — the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down.
Refreshingly, throughout the book Belfort openly and explicitly notes his marked Jewish identity and that of all of his close co-conspirators. It amounts to a fascinating look at the inner workings of a corrupt Jewish financial organization — and Belfort succeeds magnificently in narrating the rollicking affair. No wonder one newspaper called it “A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’s GoodFellas. The comparison to Wolfe is apt, but rather than Scorsese’s GoodFellas, Belfort’s tale should be compared to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because it shares the same non-stop extreme adventure and use of mind-altering drugs.
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This essay will focus on the book, but be aware that in the background can be found fodder for Part II of the story, that of the 2013 film made from the book, starring the decidedly non-Jewish mega-star Leonardo DiCaprio. The contrast between Jewish identity in the book and lack of it in the film is breathtaking — and deserving of serious attention.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street
The book begins in the spring of 1987, with Belfort just starting a new job as “pond scum” at the stock trading firm of LF Rothschild, which was a step up from selling refreshments at the beach or meat and seafood door-to-door on Long Island. Suddenly, the story jumps forward six years and Belfort is now in charge of a brokerage firm named Stratton Oakmont, a very WASPy sounding name, but in fact a firm composed mostly of Belfort’s fellow ethnics.
The book highlights the hijinks going on at Stratton Oakmont — a midget tossing contest on the trading floor, for example — and, as a memoir, follows Belfort’s personal life, which revolved around his former model wife Nadine and his drug habit. Rather than recount that, however, I would like to explore the ethnic undercurrent in the story, for that casts more light on what is happening in America more generally today than does the story of a thirty-something hedonist.
Belfort grew up in Bayside, Queens, the son of two accountants. At one point he planned to be a dentist and was actually enrolled in dental school, but dropped out when he learned there was not much money to be made in modern dentistry. This middle-class trajectory shows that Belfort should not have nursed class grudges like many of the poor do, but Belfort did — against the very wealthy: but only if they were WASPs.
Belfort’s candor in writing about himself, his fellow Jews, and many of their attitudes toward outsiders is welcome, for it reveals many of the themes we’ve covered at TOO (and The Occidental Quarterly) over the years. And Belfort is not at all shy about writing disparagingly about some of his co-ethnics, something which the Jewish community often discourages as being a shande far di goyim — a scandal in front of non-Jews.
The picture he paints of his father Max, for example, is one of a frustrated man with a titanic temper: “Even a simple trip to the refrigerator could be a dicey affair,” with his father exploding if any milk dripped down his chin as he drank directly from the container. “That goddamn piece-a-shit motherfucking milk container! Can’t those stupid bastards who design milk containers come up with one that doesn’t make the fucking milk drip down your godforsaken chin?”
Still, Belfort credits his father for coaching his Little League team and attending every last school recital Belfort took part in. Yet Belfort can also allow that his father “was the tightest man to ever walk the face of the planet.” Rarely do we read these days of that stereotype about Jews.
The real fascination surrounding Jewish characters comes with Belfort’s descriptions of his comrades, beginning with his right-hand man, Danny Porush. Danny, Belfort begins, “was a Jew of the ultrasavage variety.” With “steel-blue eyes,” Porush did not appear to be “a member of the Tribe,” a situation Porush himself helped along by dressing and acting like a gentile. Like many other Jews, “Danny burned with the secret desire to be mistaken for a WASP and did everything possible to cloak himself in complete and utter WASPiness.”
Stratton Oakmont’s head of the finance department, Andy Greene, however, would never pass as a WASP, beginning with the fact that he had “the worst toupee this side of the Iron Curtain.” To Belfort, Greene’s toupee “looked like someone had taken a withered donkey’s tail and slapped it onto his egg-shaped Jewish skull, poured shellac over it, stuck a cereal bowl over the shellac, and then placed a twenty-pound plate of depleted uranium over the cereal bowl and let it sit for a while.”
When discussing another Greene who worked for him — this time Kenny “the Blockhead” Greene — Belfort describe’s Greene’s mother Gladys: “Starting from the very top of her crown, where a beehive of pineapple blond hair rose up a good six inches above her broad Jewish skull, and all the way down to the thick callused balls of her size-twelve feet, Gladys Greene was big.”
She was also quite willing to break the law, beginning with evasion of taxes on the cigarettes she and the adolescent Kenny smuggled into New Jersey. When Kenny turned fifteen and began smoking pot, his mother immediately became a pot dealer, providing her son “with finance, encouragement, a safe haven to ply his trade, and, of course protection, which was her specialty.” And because cocaine “offered too high a profit margin for ardent capitalists like Gladys and the Blockhead to resist,” they were soon enough plying that trade on Long Island, too.
One gets the feeling that for Belfort, the descriptor “savage” has a redeeming quality to it, as he describes many Jews that way, such as “the most savage young Jews anywhere on Long Island,” those from the towns of Jericho and Syosset. Then there is the Wall Street legend, J. Morton Davis, “a savage Jew,” and even Belfort himself, “the most savage Jew of all.” And don’t forget the “Quaalude-addicted, potbellied savage Jew with a thousand-watt social smile and a secret life’s mission to be mistaken for a WASP” who ripped Belfort off when selling him horses.
Make no mistake, Belfort adopts the irreverent tone of a frat brother, stereotyping wide swaths of humanity with a broad brush. Zurich-based German women were “broad-shouldered and barrel-chested enough to play for the NFL,” while the average French woman roaming the streets of Geneva “was slender and gorgeous, in spite of her hairy armpits.” With the Irish, “their proclivity for all things alcoholic was to be expected.”
Then there is the one Asian character in the story, Victor, “the Depraved Chinaman.” Victor “was a Chinaman, and like most of his brethren, if he had a choice between losing face or cutting off his own balls and eating them, he would gladly take out a scissor and start snipping at his scrotal sac.”
Such irreverence slides into the realm of hatred, however, when the subject turns to Germans:
Insofar as my own humble Jewish opinion went, the Geneva-based Frogs were the ones to do business with — as opposed to the Zurich-based Krauts, who passed their time speaking disgusting glottal German while binge-drinking piss-warm beer and eating Wiener schnitzel until their stomachs bulged out like female kangaroos after a birthing cycle. And, besides, it didn’t take any great leap of logic to realize that there had to be a few Nazi bastards still hiding out among the populace, living off the gold fillings they’d forcibly extracted from my ancestors before they gassed them to death!
The real animus in the book, however, which stands out on page after page, is that against the WASPs around New York City. Belfort loathes them.
Belfort, however, provides a useful sociological opinion when he notes from first-hand experience that “WASPs were yesterday’s news, a seriously endangered species no different than the dodo bird or spotted owl. And while it was true that they still had their little golf clubs and hunting lodges as last bastions against the invading shtetl hordes, they were nothing more than twentieth-century Little Big Horns on the verge of being overrun by savage Jews like myself, who’d made fortunes on Wall Street and were willing to spend whatever it took to live where Gatsby lived.”
Read the rest: theoccidentalobserver.net
